What News of a Metallica New Album?

In news that is sure to delight fans, it appears that the Metallica new album is on its way soon enough, though exact details of a release date or title of the new LP are scarce.

Keeping Busy

It’s been six years since thrash-metal veterans Metallica released a new album, but they have not been sitting idle since their 2008 “Death Magnetic” release. Firstly, in 2011, they released an ambitious collaboration with the late Lou Reed that was, however more Reed than Metallica. The artistic effort has been reviled by critics and managed to alienate a huge portion of the fans, and not just the segment that refuses to acknowledge the existence of any of their albums after The Black Album. Metacritic lists Lulu, the band’s collaboration with Lour Reed as having a 45 out of 100 critics score and a crushing 2.1 out of 10 user score.

Subsequently, in 2013, they spent a while working and releasing “Metallica Through The Never”, an IMAX thriller concert film that ended up receiving far more positive reviews, holding scores of 7.3 on imdb and 78% in Rotten Tomatoes. Following these forays into different genres, as well as mediums, fans’ expectations of a new full-fledged, all-Metallica album grew to new heights and, in 2014, the first information started coming out.

New Material

Firstly, in March news spread around the Internet that at one of their shows in Bogota, Colombia they have played a brand new song. Bootleg versions flooded the web and just two days later the band has released a “garage demo version” of the song on YouTube. The track, called “Lords of Summer” is 8 and a half minutes long and is, unsurprisingly, keeping in line with the pace and style of Death Magnetic than anything else, but with of throwbacks to earlier stuff, including a distinct “Kill ‘Em All” drum part.

Plans for the Fall

Later down, in May, Metallica’s guitarist Kirk Hammett mentioned that he’s currently reworking the solo on “Lords of Summer”, which he saw as incomplete and, more importantly, that they plan on spending the summer with their families, but come September, they’re going to go through the riffs they already have saved in their “riff bank” and start building actual songs for the Metallica new album.

Soon after, in early June, Metallica drummer and leader Lars Ulrich was making it sound easy, saying that with the material they already have, the album is actually about “90% done”. He went on to explain in some detail their process of creation: “When we write songs, we don’t really write a song at a time, we write kind of more like… We take passes at a bunch of different things at the same time. So we’ll, sort of, develop maybe ten ideas, and then we’ll go back and develop those ten ideas again, and then we’ll, sort of, keep embellishing them, I guess is the word. We rarely write a song, and now we’re gonna write a second song. We sort of have 10 balls in the air, or 20 balls in the air, and then we sort of keep moving them around, moving sections around and embellishing, like, ‘Take this intro and put it over here.’ So it’s more that type of thing, is what our songwriting sessions often are.”

Already in the studio?

Their plans for entering the studio in the fall were also divulged by bass player Robert Trujillo who, in an interview given in the later summer mentioned that mid-September is the time that they band is planning on buckling down to work on the new material. By all indications, they are already doing so and they could be in the studio, instruments in hands, right now, while you are reading this. The work on the Metallica new album will, however, be paused for at least one week in later November when, the band has announced, they are going to make camp in “The Late Late Show” with Craig Ferguson for one whole week, playing on the show every night from the 17th to the 21st, giving late night TV the metal dose that it obviously wants.

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